Thursday, June 28, 2007

Blizzard: NBA Draft!

The NBA draft is...today, I guess, and I'm more excited for this than I was for the NFL draft. Maybe it's because the future of the Minnesota Timberwolves will be tangibly determined in the next 24 hours. Maybe it's because there are so many exciting players in this draft I'm going to want to follow next season. Maybe it's summer and it takes less to get me going than it does in April when the semester is winding down heavy. Maybe it's because I won't be able to watch the draft on TV, and will be following it on the computer like a true jackass. I don't have the answers, man.

Vic Carucci says the Vikes are one of the teams that didn't do enough to improve in the offseason.

As a student of literature, I often come upon world-class writers who have distasteful politics (Pound), messy personal lives (Hughes), or a tendency to act like an ass (Hemingway). There might be all sorts of reasons I want to disrespect the writing, but ultimately, I have to respect the work's quality. That's how I feel about Bill Simmons. Oh, no, it's not that he's that good or anything, or that he's an awful person (I don't know). It's just that his writing consistently annoys me in some way, and yet I keep wanting to read what he writes about football and basketball. Anyway, here's his mock draft with Chad Ford.

Suspension of DisbeliefVia Ballhype, Len Pasquarelli talks with DeAngelo Williams about why he'll be better in 2007 than he was in 2006. Pasquarelli also mentions Tarvaris Jackson and Chad Greenway as second-year players expected to make significant 2007 contributions.

Finally, if this is the sort of thing that interests you, I've got a stupid summer project at Costanza Book Club. I'm re-watching the first eight seasons of Seinfeld (season 9 is not yet available on DVD), choosing favorite quotes and dialogue, and offering a brief comment on the episode. It's a really stupid way to spend a summer, but that doesn't deter me in the slightest.

3 comments:

the carucci article is funny. for the vikings he talks mostly about what they've added. for the packers though he can only shake his head in disbelief. clearly they are worlds apart (cliche) while living on the same street.

Either the writer of the "Dynamic Duos" article doesn't know anything about statistics, or he's hoping his readers don't. As his sole piece of evidence to support his assertion that running back tandems have become a growing trend since 2000, he cites the following table representing the number of teams in a given season that had two backs with at least 100 carries each:2006: (13)2005: (13)2004: (10)2003: (13)2002: (12)2001: (12)2000: (7)

Hmmm... I don't see much of a trend, just one abnormally low year selected to lead things off. Run that back one more year and you get:1999: (10) - plus one more back, Chris Warren, with 99 carries

This kind of thing drives me more nuts than it should. How can a professional writer get away with writing an entire article about this?

That's true: there's not real good analysis in that article. The statistic used--teams with 2 RBs with 100 carries--is not very helpful either: a team that suffers a RB injury partway through the year is likely going to have two RBs with 100+ carries. That doesn't mean the intent was to split carries.

You hear a lot now about the duo backfields because there are a lot of really good ones today. But when Blue Viking Devil and I were doing some fantasy analysis, we realized there are still somewhere around 20 teams using one feature back.

But believe it or not, the Vikings.com content has really improved in the last 5 years.